If You Can't See the Sun
by horsecrazy2
Summary: This wasn't how things were supposed to go.  He was supposed to be the hero.


**A/N: This is a one-shot for the LJ community thethirdwar. It's a collaboration by several different Seiftis authors, based around the concept of a third war after the world decides Rinoa is a threat that cannot be tolerated any longer. Seifer is offered a new shot at SeeD status by Quistis herself if he tracks down his old flame and helps apprehend her. Looks us up on Livejournal- there is not much going on in the comm right now, but expect much awesomeness to come. **

**This one-shot takes place several months into the conflict.**

_You never think about freedom until you don't have it anymore. _

_But honestly, I never had it, I was always just too fucking stupid to see it- a soldier's just a commodity shit out of whatever facility spent the time and the money and the patience to mold them into a good little fucking robot. _

_But forget all that._

_That's not why I'm writing this. _

* * *

><p>Tap a vein and get this over with, motherfucker.<p>

He's ready.

He blinks the ceiling into focus and winds a long smooth inhale of a breath back up into his lungs, and he curls one leather-bound hand up into a fist to etch all the veins in his arm into stark relief-

And through double-paned glass he sees her staring in at him like he is a fucking zoo animal on display, clipboard in hand.

She wears her glasses tip-tilted just so on her face and no smile on her lips, and now his heart is a little fucking fist inside his throat, trying to pound its way out.

Once upon a time, a boy with a stick sword and a mother who loved him used to think.

The man who has survived a war and a mother and a bossy blue-eyed bitch who forgot him is smarter now: he gets what the boy could just never quite fucking understand.

Once upon a time is only the opening line to a lie he has built his entire life on, one big shitty, crumbling foundation that shifts and cracks and comes apart at the seams a little more each day.

He folds his hands in his lap and his hope in his heart, until it is only a tiny compressed corner of a thing, not even worth exploring.

The MRI machine is a fucking mouth, swallowing him whole.

* * *

><p>She drums her pen in a steady heartbeat rhythm against the edge of her clipboard, watching him.<p>

He disappears inch by inch by inch, until she can see only his feet and the bright-bleached protrusions of his socks, sticking out in little motionless lumps that do not so much as twitch.

Dr. Kadowaki's touch is a fleeting ghost of a thing, grazing her shoulder. "Quistis," she says softly, without looking away from the boy on the exam table, "they will never let him go, treaty between Garden and Galbadia notwithstanding. Odine will use him up until he can't get anything more from him."

She has to stop thinking of him as a boy. He is a man now, tall and proud and carved hard around the edges, all razor angles of snarling defense and half-smile twists of bitterness.

The boy is gone.

Thinking about his smile will not bring him back.

"Quistis?" There is another fleeting ghost of a touch on her shoulder, and she turns away from the window.

"Yes," she says calmly. "I know."

* * *

><p><em>Maybe you're wondering why the fuck I <em>am _writing this. _

_Maybe I don't give enough of a shit to tell you. Maybe you shouldn't have given this to me in the first place- is how I feel really any of your fucking business? Is anything about me really any of your fucking business anymore? _

_Fuck recording my thoughts. You know and I know my sanity or lack thereof doesn't mean a goddamned thing. _

_That freak with the faggy collar has an honest-to-Hyne Sorceress' Knight on his hands now. He's never letting me go._

_Think about that, Instructor. Think about why I said yes in the first place. They couldn't have taken me if I hadn't really wanted them to, you know. _

* * *

><p>Getting shit out of Time Compression is like being born all over again: darkness and pressure and a whole lot of other goddamned unpleasant things you don't remember anyway.<p>

This is what he does remember:

Kaleidoscopic wheel of midnight-bruised sky and blank black sheet glass of placid moonlit ocean-

Raw sandpaper scrape of breath across his throat, coiling down into his lungs-

Little hiccupping gasps buried facedown in the sand beside him, fading fast-

The hiccups are what he remembers most clearly, if you want to know the truth. The hiccups and all that hair wound up on the beach beside him, the same shade as the sand underneath that slice of half-moon silver in the sky above them.

He remembers it took him a long time to realize she was going to make it. He remembers curling up underneath that slice of half-moon silver in the sky with her limp sand-soggy body in his arms and tears on his cheeks, and he remembers the birth of the smile that is his dawning understanding that her ragged breaths are leveling out and going smooth around the edges-

He remembers he has never again had a reason to smile like that.

He remembers-

He remembers her looking right through him to Squall Leonhart and his chest squeezing and his heart cracking all across the fucking foundation of fault lines laid down long before she got there-

And he remembers why he doesn't want to remember shit anymore.

He blinks until the ceiling above his head becomes the sky.

The sky is blue. The sun is yellow.

These are the only things he needs to remember, because he sure as shit is never going to see them again.

* * *

><p><em>Tell me a story.<em>

_Tell me a story tell me a story tell me a fucking _story_, is what I always used to ask._

_Here's a story for you._

_Maybe you'll recognize it. _

_Once upon a time there was a boy with a mother and father who loved him, and a couple of dickhead foster brothers and sisters who feared him. _

_And then one day, it was time for the mother and father who loved him to give him away. They gave him away with a little bossy blue-eyed bitch of a girl, so he would not be alone. _

_And he was not alone._

_He was afraid._

_He was afraid all the fucking time, because at night when his new father came to get him, he knew the bossy blue-eyed bitch was going to be next. _

_Eventually, one day, the boy and the girl started to love one another, because no one else would do it for them. They did everything together. They held each other when it was time for their new father to bring them back. When the girl cried, the boy promised that one day when he was big enough, he was going to hand that fat fuck's ass to him like the little sniveling fucking coward he was. _

_And then they were given away again._

_And the boy thought this time they were finally safe. The boy thought they were going to be together and grow up happy and all that shit, and get the happily ever after the boy's mother used to read to him about._

_And then the girl forgot about the boy._

_And the boy did not live happily ever after. _

_See how the real stories always fucking turn out? _

* * *

><p>She has not junctioned a GF in 395 days.<p>

She makes it 200 days in before she understands that her memories are not gone, only buried beneath layers and layers of silt and rust and dust, the bedrock of all denial. Her amnesia is a protective gloss over all the ugly unwanted _things _she will not and cannot and does not want to acknowledge, and she leaves it in place as long as she can.

100 days before they pack him up and ship him off to this place where there is no sun or sky or clean breeze-scented air, she remembers that this boy…this _man _used to mean something to her.

He used to mean everything to her.

There is a burned-out star where her heart is supposed to be, or perhaps a black hole; whatever it is is sucking and tearing and taking, and everything that makes her cold calculating unfeeling SeeD Trepe is being picked up and flung away-

And there is only this man left, sitting on his bed with his hands clasped between his knees and a smirk on his face, staring back at her through the glass between them.

She drops her head and pencils a note on her clipboard, and she walks away still feeling his gaze burning through her shoulder blades to her bird-fluttering heart inside her chest.

* * *

><p><em>The experiments don't really hurt, if you're wondering.<em>

_If you even care._

_They're more annoying than anything. I feel like one of those frogs in bio, getting poked and fucking prodded: roll over, sit up, beg, right, Instructor? _

_But you know better than anyone I've never been good at that. _

_So I know you're asking yourself why the fuck am I putting up with this? Why is Seifer Almasy of all people just letting himself get led away by the hand, without doing anything more than breaking a couple of noses? _

_You once told me you stopped junctioning your GFs because you wanted to remember our childhood, after the way the cowboy talked about it._

_Maybe one day you'll get it, then._

* * *

><p>He lied.<p>

They hurt like a bitch. It is all he can do to keep from screaming and crying and flinging shit all across the room when they shoot him full of this shit that burns through his veins like a fucking flash fire scrubbing clean tangles of forestland-

Breathe in in _in_, fucker- let yourself spiral, let yourself fucking _float_-

Dreaming is a little like floating, ever notice that?

Drift, drift, drift; the scene shifts, clicks over to something else like a projector changing slides, and you're just getting pushed and pulled and flipped all over the fucking place, falling falling falling-

That's what Time Compression feels like too, if you're curious.

Like dreaming, like falling-

And coming out of it?

It's a fall that ends in a concrete belly flop, smashing all your bones and your teeth and your fucking lips-

You're a corpse that's been slit open by one fucking hell of a sloppy-ass medical examiner, when all is said and done.

He's used to being a corpse by now, he supposes: after all, isn't this the way they are treating him, forgoing authorization forms and names and any glimpse of human warmth in the hands that clamp down around his arms like restraints?

He still remembers reaching for that piece of paper Odine's tech tried to hand him, getting it snatched back from his fingers like that crazy piece of fucking shit is afraid he's going to rub fucking filth all over it-

_-vat are you doing we do not need any forms he has no rights-_

He is a fucking animal to them. It's a wonder they even let him out for proper bathroom breaks.

Dr. Kadowaki cheerfully refers to this fucking hole as his room, but that is not what it really is, of course.

It's a cell.

It's a cell and he is their prisoner, and she doesn't even give a _shit_, and this is worse than understanding he is never again going to know anything that isn't the soft heart monitor pulse of machines blinking and clanging and going off all around him-

He stops looking up when he sees a flash of gold outside the glass now.

* * *

><p><em>-it's only until odine can gather enough information to help us track down and stop rinoa seifer it's nothing I promise odine says it's very important to study the bond between sorceress and knight-<em>

She remembers thinking Cid is too naive and kind-hearted and soft, and a million other adjectives that are not befitting the leader of a military institute.

She has always understood Odine willingly lets go of nothing that has fallen into his clutches- his morals are pliable when it comes to 'scientific advancement', all stretch and stretch and stretch and give and give and give-

It is Seifer who will be torn to pieces between a government and a Garden, not Odine's conscience.

No argument she can offer talks him out of it. The only thing she can do for him is be here while he is slowly chipped and hacked and whittled away at: they will carve and carve and carve until he is something she does not recognize anymore, until he is another skeleton wandering these halls and mumbling to himself, like all the test subjects (guinea pigs) that have come before him.

He stops looking back at her when she stands with her clipboard in one hand and the other pressed to the glass between them, and something inside of her withers and coils up and goes silent forever.

"Can I see him?" Is what she wants to ask, but does not.

She forgot everything he did for her, in a dark room and a darker bathroom where he stopped her from dying-

How can he even stand to _look _at her-

She files her evaluations with Garden by courier.

She does not go home.

* * *

><p><em>All right, Instructor, I'll give you a hint:<em>

_It's because of the look on your face when Cid said successfully tracking down Rinoa would re-qualify you for an instructor's license. _

_Not quite a smile- I don't see you do that very often; has anyone ever told you to take the stick out of your ass once in a while- but your whole face lit up. Like it used to do back at the orphanage, when that fuckwit Chicken Wuss did something you told him to, or Cid brought home a new book for you to read, or that one time Selphie dared me to kiss you and you pretended not to like it-_

_Not that you remember any of that._

_Not that you remember anything that matters. _

_All you do is forget. _

_Must be nice, huh?_

* * *

><p>His dreams are a long endless landscape of ash-colored snow.<p>

He wants to stay in them forever, even if they reek of blood and shit and mud, getting ground up underneath his boots.

It's just…sometimes she puts in an appearance, you know? Not the way she is now: coldly unblinking and unsmiling and unfucking _everything_, where he is concerned, but the way she could have been, before that man began to unravel her innocence one fragile layer at a time, before Garden stepped in to finish the job and out emerged this woman with the steel-propped backbone and the eyes that skim right past him like he's a distasteful fucking stain on her shirt that she does not have time to wash.

In that long endless landscape of ash-colored snow, her hair is bleached to coronal white flame against all that fucking gray: it's the brightest spot in his whole goddamned life. In that long endless landscape of ash-colored snow, she smiles at him and reaches for his hand and swings it along her side like they are just one more happy fucking couple making eyes at one another-

And he sinks.

Farther, farther, _farther_, _goddammit, _he doesn't want to remember that none of it is real, that she is watching him from outside his prison, making little marks on that fucking clipboard of hers: tick tick fucking tick, yes, yes, yes, all of the above, burn the bastard at the stake-

Once, he forgets to not look up.

Her lips are all twisted up like his chest, that goddamned pen sitting still and silent and steady against the corner of her board like she has forgotten it's even there-

And inside his chest his traitorous fucking heart thumps like a jackhammer and turns over like a goddamned engine groaning to life, and he is on his feet without knowing how and when and why he's even fucking standing.

There are three fucking _inches _between them, and she is not looking back down at that fucking board this time-

Someone wants him to sit down and hold out his arm, but they can shut the fuck _up _because he is trying to figure out the look in her eyes and the expression on her face-

He snaps the hand on his shoulder like a fucking twig; his wrist lock is a casual afterthought of a thing, and the next idiot that lunges for him with a syringe they're wielding like it's a goddamned sword gets an elbow to the side of the head that slumps him moaning to both knees, and now the guy's head is right in line with Seifer's knee: a careless backslap of a strike propels the guy's nose right into the point of it, and puts him on the floor for good.

He catches a fragmented glimpse of her face frowning through the glass at him before something hits him upside the skull and rings his head like a fucking gong-

-motherfucker _shit _everything is spinning and someone's got his brain between a pair of rocks and he slides down and down and forward and he cannot see her anymore-

* * *

><p><em>It's funny how shit works out, you know that, Instructor? <em>

_Like how you grew up so fucking smart, but really you're just one big window-licking fuckwit when it comes to some things. _

_Like how I feel about you._

_Like how I've always felt about you. _

_I wouldn't write that if I thought you were actually going to read this- it's none of your fucking business anymore. But you're never going to read this, are you, Instructor? That would require you to actually come in here. That would require you to actually fucking _talk _to me. _

_You haven't talked to me in two months. _

_You never used to do that. You'd get pissed, kick me out of class, send me to detention, but you never _ignored _me, you know? _

_I'm not going to lie- it hurts. _

_It hurts a lot. _

_I've survived worse, though. _

_I just never thought I was going to have to survive _you_, Instructor. _

* * *

><p>"Have you told him how you feel?"<p>

She stands with her pen in her hand and her heart in her throat, and she is thinking about how much you really _see_, during all your years and years amongst children taught to smother and bury and store away their feelings.

She never would have guessed she'd given away anything.

There are cracks in her mask, starring the plaster.

There are cracks in her chest, starring her heart.

He is never getting out of here.

He will never know that she remembers the boy and the way he used to smile at her and the way he slipped his arms around her at night-

He will never understand how very very _grateful _she is, all these years and years later when child Quisty is just a blurred snapshot of a memory, drifting around somewhere inside of her waiting to be noticed.

She clicks her pen and shifts her stance and brings a hand up through a loop that stops it dead against her hair, smoothing and tucking and folding away strands that do not need to be smoothed or tucked or folded away.

Everything is perfectly aligned and neatly in place and not nearly daring enough to shift a hairline fracture of a centimeter out of its designated spot.

This is how she has structured her entire existence, after all.

It is only the sight of him reclining on a bed with one foot on the mattress underneath him and the other dangling down along the side that does not fit.

"No," she says quietly. She does not bother to lie.

Dr. Kadowaki gives her another fleeting brush of a touch, and for just a moment she feels fingers grope and catch and squeeze shut around her shoulder.

"I think you should, dear."

The doctor's footsteps take a long time to click away down the corridor: she is getting old and hobbling and shuffling, and Quistis wonders how long she has left.

Nothing lasts for long in her life, after all.

This is the trade she made, when she sold her soul for a dress uniform and a few mirror-polished medals, glinting back at her from the rack in her closet.

* * *

><p>He has been here, by his estimation, for close to three months now; he doesn't get a clock or one of those calendars with fucking babies dressed up as fruit, of course, but he hears enough in the snatches of conversation that float back to him through the haze of drugs and dreams to work out an educated guess of how much he's missed and how long the world has gone on without him.<p>

She stops by his door just once, like she is thinking about coming in, and he sits all the way up in his bed with one hand draped over his knee and the other clenched into a fist beside him on the mattress.

For a long time, all they can do is stare at one another; his throat's all clogged up like he swallowed something fucking wrong, and there's this twist of discomfort on her face that makes him think maybe she feels the same, maybe she will not step inside because she is afraid, because she _remembers_, because she thinks he hates her for ever forgetting in the first place-

The thing is he can piss and moan and sling as much shit as he wants, but he can never hate her, for as long as he fucking _lives_, he will always remember holding her in the dark and her tiny fucking little hands curled up underneath her cheek, because in his arms with his forehead pressed tightly up against hers she feels safe enough to sleep at last-

He is poised in this one fucking moment forever, and as long as it does not end, he can make up all kinds of shit excuses for her presence outside his door.

She is here to tell him her instructor's license does not mean as much as him.

She is here because she remembers and she is sorry and she never stopped loving him either, even if she forgot about it for a little while.

_Fuck _he can't breathe, he can't move or fucking _think_-

For eons, he has not been touched by anyone who is not a rubber-gloved lab tech leaching samples from him and pressing little cold-steel diodes to the sides of his fucking head like the goddamned lab rat he is- he knows how those ugly little fucking rat things in their wheels feel now, running running running without going anywhere, watching the entire world through yellow-clouded plastic-

He just wants _something _from her, come on, Instructor, give him a fucking _sign _here-

She slips her pen through the little metal ring in her clipboard and walks away with it folded up against her chest.

* * *

><p><em>I wrote this because I'm an idiot. There's this little stupid part of me that hopes you <em>do _read it, ok? And there's this even stupider fucking part of me that hopes you read it and you remember what you said when we first enrolled at Garden, how you hoped we had all the same classes together and you were going to come find me at lunch and sit together-_

_We were holding hands when that shit dropped us off at the office. You wouldn't let go of me. You said…you said I made you feel safe. And nobody ever told me that before, you know? It felt good. It made me feel like…like one of the heroes in Matron's stories. _

_I believed you. And that was my own fucking mistake, because I should have known after we left the orphanage and ended up where we did that all those stories Matron told us were a bunch of shit. I _did _know that. _

_I just always hoped I was wrong. _

_I always hoped…_

_I don't know, Instructor. _

_You tell me. _

_Once, I told you everything I hoped and dreamed about and would never admit to anyone else. _

* * *

><p>She has been turning this dilemma over and over and over in her mind for days.<p>

There are too many guards for her to free him. They cannot fight their way past them all, SeeD training or no SeeD training; if he causes too much damage, Odine may have him shot, but it is unlikely: he will not want to lose such a valuable test subject to something so mundane as a little escape attempt.

She has always known the answer; she has just been too afraid to face it.

Forty-four days after he is first handed over by a well-meaning Cid with a smile on his face and a contract in his hand, she sets down her clipboard and strides confidently into one of the storage rooms when no one is looking.

SeeD manual page 73, section A: if you do not actually belong, project an image of authority until no one bothers to question your motives anymore. Engage enemy only if no other option is open.

She leaves with a syringe in her hand and this time she does not hesitate at his door; a quick stab of her finger against the green-glowing control panel slides the door aside with a reptilian hiss that brings his head up from where he has tucked it snugly into the hands he folds casually behind his skull, and she can see the shock in his eyes even from here.

"What the fuck are you-" He cuts himself off as the door clicks shut behind her and she sets her syringe down on the table beside his bed, and now they are face to face for the first time in months as he unfolds his legs from underneath him and brings all 6' 2" of his lean soldier's body towering upright.

She has to look up and up and up to see into his eyes.

"Odine will never let you leave. Dr. Kadowaki says he has an agreement with Galbadia that trumps the contract between Garden and President Deling's successor."

He crosses both arms over his chest and leans his hip back against one corner of the bed, flicking hair from his eyes. "I know that." He tips a nod toward the syringe on the table, and he will not look away from her face. "What is that?"

She knots her hands in front of her thighs and looks away from him, out over this spartan square of a cell that will be his home forever, if she does not help him.

There is a fist in her throat, squeezing her answer down to a hoarse little whisper of a response. "It's…it's a way out. There are too many guards, Seifer; I can't help you escape. Odine won't order them to kill you- you're too valuable to him for that."

She can see in his eyes that he understands what she is offering him, and now she can only breathe in little asthmatic gasps: the fist has squeezed itself that tightly shut.

"You won't get your license back."

"You'll be experimented on for the rest of your life," she tells him quietly.

* * *

><p>She is jeopardizing her entire career for him. She is throwing away everything that has ever fucking meant <em>anything <em>to her-

Does this mean-

You've got to be fucking _shitting _him-

Quistis Trepe is giving up Garden for him. They will arrest her, demote her- she'll be thrown out on her ass for violating a contract like this, and where will she even fucking _go_-

She's never had another home like Garden. The orphanage is a run-down fucking heap, its overseer locked away in the nutbin painting smiling yellow stick figures all over the walls of her prison. Trepe's stupid moon-faced students panting after her in that short little fucking skirt are each and every one of them her reasons for getting up in the morning and taking another step forward and sucking in another thread of oxygen down into her lungs-

And he's not taking that away from her. She's already had too much taken away from her, you know?

"No," he says coldly and clearly and steadily.

"Seifer-"

"Tch. You don't _really _think you're going to fucking get away with something like that, do you? Getting cocky in your old age, Instructor. They'll fucking lock you up, you know- maybe you'll get to take my spot."

"No I won't," she replies quietly, and now suddenly they are hip to hip and chest to chest and he can feel her hands pressed up against his stomach and her fucking _mouth _on his, and he slides his fingers back through her hair and holds her against him harder closer _tighter _than he has ever fucking held her before, because this is his one goddamned shot, and he's not going to blow it-

It takes him forever to crawl up through all the layers and layers of sensation that are her hair in his hands and her forehead pressed to his and their synchronized breathing, sliding in and out and in and out between his lips/her lips, all smashed up against one another until he doesn't get where one ends and the other begins.

Fuck _him_-

There is a bee sting of pain in his arm that jerks his head back away from hers, and now he can see that shiny little glaze across her eyes that reminds him of little blue-eyed Quisty beside him in the dark, crying herself to sleep, and now he is crashing, crashing, fucking _crashing_-

-wheeling through gray-smeared fog and gradations of white that layer deeper and darker and darker-

* * *

><p>She can hear his heart where she presses her cheek up against his chest: <em>thathumpthathumpthathump<em>, a frantic hummingbird cadence against her cheek and her ear.

_Thathumpthathumpthathump tha-thump tha-thump_-

She eases him back against the bed as he sags into flaccid flopping deadweight inside her arms-

_Tha-thump tha-thump tha-thump tha-thump tha-thump-_

She is so sorry she cannot even tell him, but it is all going to be over in a moment-

_Tha-thump…tha-thump…tha-thump…tha-thump…_

She combs the hair from his eyes and stretches out beside him on the bed, and now it is she holding him as he slips over the edge and tumbles down and down and down into silence and darkness and freedom-

_Tha-thump…tha-thump…tha-thump…_

_Tha-thump…tha-thump…_

_Tha-thump…_

_…_


End file.
